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Sunday, May 31, 2009

On George Tiller

The doctor -- who specialized in late-term abortions at his Wichita, Kan., clinic -- fell victim to someone with murder in his heart and a gun in his hand. From a dispatch by The Associated Press:

The gunman fled, but a 51-year-old suspect was arrested some 170 miles away in suburban Kansas City three hours after the shooting, Wichita Deputy Police Chief Tom Stolz said. Johnson County sheriff's spokesman Tom Erickson identified the man in custody as Scott Roeder, who has not been charged in the slaying.

President Barack Obama said he was shocked and outraged over the killing.

Long a focus of national anti-abortion groups, including a summer-long protest in 1991, Tiller was serving as an usher during Sunday morning services when he was shot in the foyer of Reformation Lutheran Church, Stolz said. Tiller's attorney, Dan Monnat, said Tiller's wife, Jeanne, was in the choir at the time.

Stolz said all indications were that the man acted alone, although authorities were investigating whether he had any connection to anti-abortion groups.

Stolz said the man being held would likely be charged Monday with one count of murder and two of aggravated assault. Stolz said the gunman threatened two people who tried to stop him.

The slaying of the 67-year-old doctor is "an unspeakable tragedy," his widow, four children and 10 grandchildren said in statement issued by Monnat. "This is particularly heart-wrenching because George was shot down in his house of worship, a place of peace."

IT IS SAID in the Talmud that "whoever destroys one soul is regarded by the Torah as if he had destroyed a whole world and whoever saves one soul, is regarded as if he had saved a whole world."

Some right-wing, allegedly Christian whack jobs are celebrating the death of a man who committed great evil. But is George Tiller's judge, jury and executioner -- at least by God's standard -- any better than someone who might, if it were possible, abort millions of late-term fetuses single-handedly?

Would not both have "destroyed a whole world"?

In addition, Tiller's murderer -- through this orgy of death directed against a child of God -- will have done grave damage to a movement seeking to promote respect for the lives of humanity's most vulnerable members.

WHEN IT COMES DOWN to it, Tiller merely was an executioner, carrying out death sentences passed down by a parade of people for a plethora of reasons. Tiller was just the last stop for mothers and their unborn children on a hell-bound train conceptualized by Satan, assembled by fallen and hardened hearts, driven by elites in love with "final" solutions, stoked by politicians, switched onto the main line by materialism and ridden by the selfish and the desperate alike.

But Tiller's killer . . . now he represents a special breed. This was the kind of monster who can do the devil's work and convince himself it was the Lord's idea. This was someone who set himself up as judge, jury and executioner, then said to hell with the trial.

Whoever pulled the trigger on George Tiller unilaterally decided a nation of hit men was a far superior concept to a nation of laws, and he was just the Goodfella for the job.

IF WE HOPE to remain a nation of laws and not of warlords, the full weight of what law we have left must fall upon the gunman who took it upon himself to abort the abortionist. Or, to paraphrase Fox anchor Shepard Smith,"We are America. We do not f***ing assassinate people."

Roughly a generation ago, Pope John Paul II coined a term to describe a way of life such as ours. He called it the Culture of Death.

Basically, we are a society that figures most problems can be solved by somebody -- either in the womb or out -- ending up dead. We find death, in all its forms, strangely compelling . . . and we get what we value.

George Tiller's assassin deemed death an appropriate solution to the problem of a death-dealer and acted accordingly. In doing so, this "defender of life" became just another death-dealer -- another destroyer of a whole world -- establishing himself as another antihero of our anticulture.

The Culture of Death: It's not just for the George Tillers of the world.

It's also for all those who, in the name of God, decide they will become as gods and mete out divine vengeance accordingly.